Gripping plots, compelling characters and punchy scenes – it’s easy to see why Hollywood wants to adapt the Harry Hole books. Jo Nesbø has held off – until now, with The Snowman

You get the feeling that Jo Nesbø would have become famous whatever he turned his hand to. Aged 17, he was star player with Norwegian soccer club Molde FK and won the prize for best junior player the following year.

Then he became one of Norway’s best-known rock stars as lead singer with wildly popular local band, Di Derre (Those Guys), who racked up 91 weeks in Norway’s pop charts.

And of course, he is now Norway’s most popular internationally bestselling author, with worldwide sales of more than 33 million books – and The Snowman (2010), seventh of the Harry Hole series, which features a brilliant and driven detective with unorthodox methods, is considered his best.

Nesbø, who still performs with Di Derre, has compared crime fiction to punk rock – and his visceral, punchy books grab readers by the scruff of the neck and frogmarch them down Oslo’s backstreets and into an unrelenting criminal underworld of rape, violence, exploitation and murder.

As a writer, he was influenced more by American hardboiled crime movies than by literature when he penned his first novel, The Bat (1997), and it’s easy to see why filmmakers have begged to adapt Nesbø’s crime series more or less ever since. He writes in short chapters that cut quickly from scene to scene, as if you’re watching a film.

Nesbø’s writing method is to patiently develop his story from a brief synopsis to a fuller treatment, to a longer outline and then to the finished work, just as a Hollywood screenwriter would do. What’s most satisfying about Nesbø is how his plots exhibit the precise engineering of a Swiss timepiece; he will write synopsis after synopsis, for up to a year, before he gets it where he wants it, and how his audience loves it.

As with the plays of another great Norwegian writer, Henrik Ibsen, the secrets – and the crimes – of Nesbø’s central characters are not revealed until the final act. The crime novel may be the vessel but Nesbø’s stories are really about conflict and the human condition.

However, unlike other world-renowned Scandinavian crime writers, such as the late Henning Mankell or Stieg Larsson, Nesbø eschews exposing society’s corruption – he is more interested in the smell of individual damnation. In Nesbø’s novels, it is very much ghosts from the past which cause people to do what they do.

It is important to remember that Norway has an astonishingly low murder rate. Just 23 people were murdered in Norway in 2015. Which makes every homicide in Norway personal (the entire population of Norway could fit inside St Petersburg, so you’re bound to know someone who knew the victim), and also a symbol of how fragile civilisation is; Nesbø’s books say, don’t be deluded – behind those tasteful Ikea curtains, something wicked this way comes.

Reading one of Nesbø’s intensely dark crime thrillers has the naughty pleasure of eating plain chocolate; there may be a horrible world beyond the safety of your four walls, but right now you’re safe and cosy, reading in your armchair.

Because no matter how dark the novels get, good does eventually triumph in the end – even if the hero is somebody as damaged as detective Harry Hole – and love overwhelms evil.

An ice-cold thriller

These Telegraph articles are about the film adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s Scandi noir murder mystery The Snowman. Check them out at tgr.ph/thesnowman.

The film stars Michael Fassbender as hard-drinking, chain-smoking detective Harry Hole, on the trail of what appears to be Norway’s first serial killer.

The Snowman is in cinemas on 13 October. For updates and tickets information, go to thesnowmanfilm.co.uk